Peachy the Magazine April May 2014 | Page 111

ART + ARCHITECTURE PAPER AND ARCHIVAL OBSESSIONS There appears to be an almost fetishlike obsession with paper and archives this year. Mr. Comer attempted to explain the appeal, “Now that we have access to more archival material, we are all preoccupied with how we can reanimate it and create living histories.” Often archival-based works simply present an organized mass of archival material as content, and it appears this curatorial misstep is evident in duo Valerie Snobeck and Catherine Sullivan’s installation based on a Chicago anthropologist’s obsession with airline menus. However, the archival based work by Public Collectors on the aforementioned Malachi poster by Mecca Normal guitarist David Lester. Malachi Richter is riveting. Semiotext(e), the independent publisher for theoryinfatuated intelligentsia, is presenting a series of small books for the Biennial. Foucault, anyone? Also on view are the vitrined spiral notebooks writer David Foster Wallace (whose 2008 suicide also casts him with the Cult of the Dead above) kept while working on hi